Digitalisaatio ja algoritmit - oikeustiede hukassa?
Avainsanat:
digitalisaatio, teknologia, päätöksenteko, oikeudellinen ratkaisutoiminta, algoritmitAbstrakti
Digitalisation and algorithmic decision making – jurisprudence at a crossroads?
This paper shows that research into the digitalisation of law is crucial for understanding law in modern society. Digitalisation of law consists fundamentally of the digitalisation of legal practices, as both the day-to-day work as well as broader processes of legislation and conflict management are in flux.
The central issue for jurisprudence springs not from technological change as such, but from the social, societal, and legal changes to which it gives rise. An overview of the on-going developments requires interdisciplinary dialogue between the relevant fields, as has been recognised very early on in Finnish legal informatics – for instance, the discussions from the 1980s on automated legal reasoning started out from the interplay of law, technology and society. These considerations are more relevant than ever as the effects of the development of information technologies are increasingly being felt throughout society.
The effects of technological development disrupt the underlying assumptions of legal knowledge production and present an invigorating challenge to jurisprudence and legal methodology. It is not enough to examine digitalisation in terms of the surface level of legal provisions and norms; digitalisation will require interdisciplinary methods also in order for legal research to present well-founded legal arguments. Algorithmic decision- making is one such highly topical issue where the digitalisation of law calls for a multifaceted approach, as computational methods and machine learning are employed in order to produce recommendations for legal decisions. Here the interaction between different disciplines creates the opportunity for in-depth legal analysis and legal policy- making that the topic requires. Here, law needs to step up its game and grasp the opportunity for a re-examination of legal practices in a broader sense.
